Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Winterlude, writing an e-novella

Quentin Bates went native in Iceland for ten years
before returning to live in England. He
drew heavily on his intimate experience of life there to write his debut novelFrozen Out, published by Constable & Robinson.
He is also the author of Cold
Comfort and the third book in the series Chilled to the Bone is due out later this year.

After the heated pace of
finishing my next book, Chilled to the Bone, due to be published in
April and written to a tight deadline, the last thing I could have done with
was to be writing another one right away.

With Chilled to the Bone delivered, proofread, checked and signed off in
the autumn, a short period of putting the feet up might have been in order, so
I still do not quite know why I suggested to my editor that an e-novella might
be worth doing. It is common enough
practice to knock out a budget e-book between novels. In marketing speak it’s called ‘enhancing
your brand.’ In real terms, it is giving
your readers something extra, as a year or more between books can be a stretch
for dedicated followers.

The arrival of e-books
has given this format a boost. Although I
have written non-fiction at this sort of length, I had never written short
stories as that length had never appealed, but this novella format is far more
interesting. In addition, it gives
people a decent chunk to read; enough for the tube journeys to and from work,
and maybe some left over for tomorrow morning as well, all for less than the
price of a cup of coffee.

So I was taken aback by
my editor’s enthusiasm in immediately slapping a deadline down in front of me. Maybe she thought I had it already written
when in fact it was still a bunch of ideas at the back of my head. That’s not entirely true. In fact, there was a mothballed novel, a
Gunnhildur story that did not quite come together. I don’t know if I had been over-ambitious
with what I was trying to achieve with it, or had strayed too far from the
straight and narrow of crime fiction, but one idea was to distil that story
into something smaller and neater – and with another tight deadline to work to,
I set about ruthlessly cutting and trimming.

It still did not want to
work. The characters were fine and the
murder was a cracking piece of fantasy on my part that I will undoubtedly make
use of at some point, but it still wouldn’t gel and I’m not sure why. Maybe the villains were not properly
villainous enough.

With a contract signed
and my editor expecting results, there was nothing for it but to start from
scratch, fortunately with the germ of an idea that had been at the back of my
mind for a while. To my relief, this one
came together and it turned into Winterlude.

Writing Winterlude was not as straightforward as I had hoped. I had thought naively that it would be a walk
in the park working with something a third the size of a normal book. Not so; although the volume of text is
smaller, it still needs to be plotted properly.
There are fewer options for dropping in the odd red herring here and
there and less scope for intriguing side-plots.
The characters still have to be credible, and with less elbowroom, it is
less easy to give them space to develop while being vital that this still takes
place.

The story needed to be
stripped back, more linear than it would otherwise have been, presenting a few
difficulties and calling for some discipline.
In some ways it’s harder to write a short book than a long one and as I
was at the point where I’d normally have been slipping into fourth gear, it was
disconcertingly time to start wrapping things up.

On reflection, I enjoy
this format and see the relatively low cost, and the ease and speed of
production of an e-book compared to producing a conventional book as providing
a test bench. It is less easy to take a
risk with a proper book, least of all when a publisher has people in charge of
the purse strings who are reluctant to see authors going out on a limb. One of the attractions of this format is that
it offers a way of flexing the muscles in new directions, trying out a new
approach without breaking the bank.

Winterlude sees my rotund heroine, Gunnhildur, sharing much more of
the storyline with Helgi, her colleague who has been more a background
character so far. I had wanted to make
Helgi more prominent, but I am not sure I would have had the gumption to give
him so much of the action in a full-length book; well, not yet at least. I’m still a far from established beginner at
this crime writing stuff and I’m not certain my shrewd and eagle-eyed editor
would have let me get away with that either.

So here’s to the
e-novella. The format has already
resulted in millions of self-published books, brought new writers into the
bestseller lists and hopefully, it will give some of us a little more leeway to
bend the rules and push out a few boundaries.